1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to tents, and more particularly to a pushrod-type tent frame.
2. Description of Related Art
The increasing popularization of private cars has made self-drive tours an emerging type of tourism. Given this trend, the relevant manufacturers are increasingly competing to develop vehicle accessories for accommodating people who love self-drive tours. In this context, various rooftop tents have been developed among others.
A rooftop tent refers to a tent designed to be put up on a car roof and is considered more comfortable than traditional tents that are built directly on the ground and tend to be invaded by the cold, damp air from the ground. The conventional rooftop tents typically have a tent frame composed of multiple interconnected poles that are pivotally connected to each other via joints. To hold the tent at its expanded position, fixing members are deployed around the joints. Thus, when putting up and taking down the conventional rooftop tents, people have to perform operation at each of the joints and fixing members, making the process quite inconvenient and time-consuming.
For improving the conventional rooftop tents, semi-automatic and fully-automatic rooftop tents have been introduced, such as the automatic tent frame of China Patent No. 201120240226.0 invented by the same inventor as the present invention. Referring to FIG. 1, the very prior-art tent frame has an intermediate supporting pole 23′ that is controllable to slide along its base, and implements a traction rope 31′ with a free end thereof connected to the lower end of the intermediate supporting pole 23′, so that when a driving device drives a rope windlass 32′ to release or roll up the traction rope 31′, the tent frame can be expanded or retracted. However, in this known tent frame, the traction rope 31′ has a relatively long path, leaving the exposed traction rope 31′ highly risky to malfunction. Thus, the existing automatic tent frame still needs to be improved.